Under the Silver Lake (United States, 2019)

April 19, 2019A movie review by James Berardinelli

A naked woman wearing an owl mask. Sex orgies in buried
tombs. Skinny-dipping shoot-outs. A serial killer of dogs. A topless woman with
a talkative parrot. A girl with a balloon fetish. An aggressive skunk. Enough
conspiracies and secret codes to make Dan Brown sit up and take notice. All
this and more can be found in David Robert Mitchell’s bizarre, trippy Under the Silver Lake, where the plot at
times seems as perpetually stoned as Andrew Garfield’s lead character.

I wanted to like this movie. With its neo-noir concepts and
David Lynch-inspired execution, it’s far enough off the beaten path to be
enjoyed for its sheer outrageousness. Director David Robert Mitchell, who made
the criminally underrated horror film It Follows, doesn’t settle down in a quiet comfort zone for his third feature.
Instead he reaches…but his reach exceeds his grasp (apologies to Robert
Browning). Despite all the devilishly clever moments, freaky episodes, and
general weirdness, Under the Silver Lake
is ultimately unsatisfying. The mind-blowingly dumb ending doesn’t work on any
level and it tarnishes all the good will built up in the (admittedly too long)
first 130-or-so minutes.

Sam (Garfield) is a seemingly unemployed stoner who spends
his days gazing through his binoculars at the other denizens of his Los Angeles
apartment complex. He’s so far behind on his rent that he’s about to be
evicted. That’s when he spies Sarah (Riley Keough), a lithe blonde in a bikini,
and it’s something at first sight.
They meet, go inside for a conversation about masturbation (“everyone does it,
right?”) and, after getting stoned and playing footsie, they are interrupted by
the arrival of Sarah’s roommates. “Come back tomorrow afternoon,” she offers,
“and we’ll hang out.” Sam assumes “hang out” means “have sex,” but when he
knocks on her door the next day, she’s gone. The apartment has been cleaned
out. Sam starts looking for her but his half-assed investigation leads him down
the rabbit hole. He comes to believe that (a) Sarah is dead, (b) her death is
entwined with the disappearance of a very powerful L.A.
businessman/philanthropist, and (c) there’s a massive conspiracy hiding some
dark and depraved people.

Watching Under the
Silver Lake requires the viewer to buy into the off-kilter world Mitchell
has created – a place that owes a little to Hitchcock, a little to Terry
Gilliam, and a lot to David Lynch, who might as well have been the filmmaker’s
silent muse while making this movie. The Blue Velvet influences are bursting at the seams. However, Lynch’s
uncompromisingly wacky scenarios hold together better than Under the Silver Lake and this movie’s climactic revelations are decidedly
disappointing. The problem isn’t with the unanswered questions but the ones
where resolutions are provided.

Mitchell enjoys in-jokes and poking fun at Hollywood’s
celebrity-obsessed culture. In one scene, Andrew Garfield is shown to have an
issue of “The Amazing Spider-Man” comic book on his coffee table. (He glances
at it with a look of bemused familiarity.) Alfred Hitchcock’s tombstone gets a
clever reveal. A mysterious songwriter waxes nostalgically about all the tunes
he’s written while dropping cryptic hints about humanity’s nature. A pernicious
skunk (an apt metaphor for some denizens of the Hollywood Hills) becomes one of
Sam’s most indomitable adversaries.

Garfield makes Sam the anti-Peter Parker. A rootless slacker
with anger management issues, Sam is not a nice guy (witness his reaction when
he catches a couple of kids vandalizing cars). But, although the film’s
narrative mimics a redemptive arc, that’s not where Under the Silver Lake is going. Like most of the movie, Mitchell pulls
the rug out from under this familiar, mundane progression.

The film’s journey to theaters has been as thorny as the one
Sam takes in trying to uncover the truth about Sarah’s disappearance. Under the Silver Lake made its first
public appearance at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, where it was charitably
described as “divisive.” Distributor A24 moved its release from mid-summer 2018
to December, then shifted it again to the no-man’s land of April 19, 2019. It
has been unceremoniously dumped into a few theaters with no fanfare. Although I
can’t claim the film works in a conventional sense, this is the kind of movie
that gets rediscovered at some future date and labeled with the term “cult
classic.”